Video Is The Winner In Branded Content Marketing

Via Panda, Penguin and other subtler algo updates, Google are hammering home the message that content is everything when it comes to judging the worth of a site and how often they are prepared to return it in the search results for its target keywords.

Savvy marketers have been using a variety of methods for years to attract visitors, both on and off page but the latest report from ContentWise and the Custom Content Council shows that it is video content that is proving to be an invaluable addition to their branded marketing repertoire.

The graph below, courtesy of emarketer.com, clearly shows the intent from US companies to utilise video to increase brand visibility in the coming year:

Video marketing is becoming much more of a viable and affordable option to many brands these days as they compete to get their message across. As part of an integrated marketing plan, good video content can work wonders for promoting a product or service, and with YouTube viewers watching 18.6 billion videos in January 2012 alone, it has the potential to reach a huge market.

You don’t have to blow the budget on a set of professional videos (although investing in really well produced film is never wasted if the content is right and it’s promoted well) but those on a tighter spend can produce their own. For a business looking to benefit from online video, they could start with the following ideas:

* Create a video, or even better, a series of videos that demonstrate what your product or service can help with and why there is a gap in the market for it. Show potential customer WHY they need you.

* Encourage or help satisfied clients to produce video testimonials for your brand

* Think about your audience – you may be targeting 3 or 4 different sets of demographic so produce video content that speaks to each of them individually. A B2B audience is very different from a B2C one so think about how to solve the problems that each sector may face and show them, via video, what you can do for them.Creation AND curation

However, we all know that marketing budgets aren’t always as large as we’d like but the great thing about video is that Google not only loves the creation of it, but also the curation of it. Brands can use their blogs or YouTube channels to collect and distribute other videos that compliment and support their message. The recent and hugely significant change to the way Google indexes video means that websites who embed others’ video content on their pages get the credit, so there has never been a better time to show other content creators a bit of love whilst benefiting yourself.

Video is massive and it’s only going to get bigger so right now is the time to start investing time and money into video content before your competitors leave you far, far behind with their efforts…..